A Hangout That’s Perfectly Kosher

The pizzas come out fast and furious at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night at Pizza World. Huge pies are hauled from steel ovens, slid onto metal plates, quickly cut into wedges and handed to the order-taker.

They’re followed by plates of Mexican food: fajitas, quesadillas, tall heaps of nachos spilling over with cheese and sour cream.

The dishes are then delivered to customers waiting in this bustling, brightly lit restaurant on Fairfax Avenue.

But the regulars aren’t moviegoers, part of a bowling league or nightclub crawlers. They are Orthodox Jews who come here after Saturday evening services for kosher pizza and nachos.

However incongruous it seems, fast food has become a post-prayer ritual.

A young man in a varsity jacket that says “YESHIVA BASKETBALL” across the back carries a pizza past a table where a Middle Eastern family, comprising three generations, eats dinner. Little girls in lace-collared dresses grab at ketchup-smeared French fries with one hand and slushy, vibrantly colored Icee drinks with another.

A man in a dark suit and fedora comes in with his wife, greets friends and orders a pizza. A high school student in a crew-neck sweater chats with classmates. When he touches his head, he realizes he’s lost his yarmulke and dashes out the door to find it.

Michelle Barak is a 17-year veteran of Pizza World.

“I go there all the time,” she says, “and now I’m married and have children, and it’s their favorite place to go. I go with my girlfriends three or four times a week for lunch. We see the same people who are there at the same time every day.”

“It’s not just the food,” she says, although she professes a fondness for the fajitas. “It’s pleasant when you go. But if you go, you’ll socialize. If you don’t want to socialize, you can go to a lot of other places where you don’t want to be seen.”

Pizza World is reminiscent of a small-town diner after a school game. People come to talk, not network--and it’s probably not how many people envision the Orthodox community on a Saturday night.

“You come in and you sort of expect to see someone you know,” says owner Darren Melamed, who is 27 but looks younger. “I’m sure that doesn’t happen too much in the outside world, the Gentile world.”

After some local yeshiva basketball games, “90% of the school is here, and there are twice as many people at the restaurant than there usually are.”

Melamed has had the restaurant a little over a year and a half after buying it from the previous owner. But his ties to the place go way back.

“I started working here when I was 13, 14,” he recalls. I worked for the guy who originally opened it. I first worked as a bus boy, but I didn’t cut it. The work was too hard, I was too young. Then I came back when I was around 19, 20. That was around the first time the owner started letting other people work there. Eventually he opened six restaurants, and I was manager of all six.”

But the business eventually went bust. When it did, Melamed was working for a food service company; when he heard this place was for sale, he jumped at it.

“I wanted to open up a restaurant,” he says, “and this one I knew better than any other, since I grew up with it . . . It would have been a tragic loss to lose this restaurant. This was one of the founding kosher pizza restaurants.”

“We made this restaurant a hangout,” says Jonathan Orenshein, talking about his high school days about a dozen years ago when his basketball team would come by after a game.

It’s the lack of pretension and hassle--and Melamed’s nachos--that has been bringing Orenshein back all these years: “You know what you want to eat, you can order it, relax, someone will bring it to you. It’s casual. Who needs to deal with anything else? . . . It’s built a following. People know they can go there with 10 friends and stack some tables together.

“And I don’t know a time when I can walk in there and not run into people I know. You’ve got to set aside extra time so you can say ‘Hi’ to everyone you know.”

And what of those who unwittingly stumble in here on a Saturday night?

“Sometimes new people who move into the neighborhood are overwhelmed by it,” Melamed says. “It’s more the Conservative or Reform Jews who haven’t been in such communal surroundings who might be surprised.

But why . . . pizza?

“They’re eating heavy meals from Friday night through Saturday lunch,” Melamed explains, and they’re almost tired of eating meat, they want to get something light and dairy.

“We don’t have the Friday night that Gentiles have. Saturday night is the night to go out. Pizza has a festive feeling. In almost all the Jewish communities, the pizza place is the place to go on a Saturday night.”

Here, it’s a different slice of Americana.